Browsing Quotes With Tag: character (187)
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All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones… You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We’ve placed a lot of emphasis in this country on the idea of people’s rights. That’s how it should be, but it makes no sense to talk about rights without also talking about responsibilities.
Rights have to come from somewhere, and they come from the community. In return, all of us have a responsibility to the community. Some people call this the “communitarian” movement, but I call it common sense.Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:57 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There’s a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It’s not something you can give; it’s something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can’t do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.
…I realize that, these days, a guy like Coach Graham might get thrown out of a youth sports league. He’d be too tough. Parents would complain.
…It saddens me that many kids today are so coddled.Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:51 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When I was finally dismissed, one of the assistant coaches came over to reassure me. “Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he?”
I could barely muster a “yeah.”
“That’s a good thing,” the assistant told me. “When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.”Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you’re determined to dislike for no good reason.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I don’t know. My friend Didier says that praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can’t defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:10 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Lin, a man has to find a good woman, and when he finds her he has to win her love. Then he has to earn her respect. Then he has to cherish her trust. And then he has to, like, go on doing that for as long as they live. Until they both die. That’s what it’s all about. That’s the most important thing in the world. That’s what man is, yaar. A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you’re not a man.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:03 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mightn’t be true of everyone, but it was true enough about me. The little good that I’ve done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration. What I do know now, and didn’t know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we’ve done have run their course, it’s the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption’s climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:51 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Wherever you go in the world, in any society, it is always the same when it comes to questions of justice,” lord Abdel Khader Khan, my mafia boss and my surrogate father, told me when I’d been six months in his service. “We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime.
“…For me,” he went on as we ate, “the opposite is true. For me, the most important thing is the amount of sin that is in the crime. You asked me, just now, why we do not make money from prostitution and drugs, as the other councils do, and I tell you it is because of the sin that is in those crimes. It is for this reason that I will not sell children, or women, or pornography, or drugs. It is for this reason that I will not permit those businesses in any of my areas. In all of these things, the sin in the crime is so great that a man must give up his soul for the profit he makes. And if a man gives his soul, if he becomes a soul-less man, it takes nothing less than a miracle for him to regain it.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:42 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:28 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“We have a saying, in the Pashto language, and the meaning of it is that you are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:10 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I said that the truth is found more often in music,” he repeated, “than it is in books of philosophy.”
“What is the truth?” I asked him. I didn’t really want to know. I was trying to hold up my end of the conversation. I was trying to be clever.
“The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,” he said. “It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men – it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone – the noblest man alive or the most wicked – has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:04 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Then learn that mortal man must always look to his ending,
and none can be called happy until that day when he carries
His happiness down to the grave in peace.” ChorusSpeaker: SophoclesPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:27 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“…Time will teach
The truth of this; for time alone can prove
The honest man; one day proclaims the sinner.” CreonSpeaker: SophoclesPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:23 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“…To slur a good man’s name
With baseless slander is one crime – another
Is rashly to mistake bad men for good.” CreonSpeaker: SophoclesPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:22 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But Old Derby was a character now.
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:05 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.
Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, “You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.”
I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:50 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is hardly believable how much can be achieved by this sort of speech, aimed at curing people, wholly directed to the good of the people listening. When the character is impressionable it is easily won over to a passion for what is noble and honourable; while a person’s character is still malleable, and only corrupted to a mild degree, truth strikes deep if she finds the right kind of advocate.
Speaker: SenecaPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:48 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A person who goes to a philosopher should carry away with him something or other of value every day; he should return home a sounder man or at least more capable of becoming one. And he will: for the power of philosophy is such that she helps not only those who devote themselves to her but also those who come into contact with her.
Speaker: SenecaPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:47 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!